The 2006 WritersUA Skills and Technologies Survey
Skills • Technologies • Platforms • Tools • Survey Home
The development of user assistance is a blend of a wide variety of skills. Technical communication skills provide the foundation. They are supplemented by skills unique to the software development world. In this survey, we asked the respondents to value the importance of a number of skills commonly employed by user assistance professionals in their daily work. The figure below shows the top ten skills valued highly with a rating of "4" (Very Valuable) or "5" (Invaluable), the top two ratings on a five-point scale.
As in past versions of this survey, writing was at the top of the list. Writing procedures (89%) is Number One. Writing reference information and Interviewing tied (79%) for third place. However, editing took a big hit. Copy Editing (58%) and Developmental Editing (52%) dropped significantly from past surveys.
Experience with authoring tools (80%) in second place is a key skill that is valued highly. The nature of working with a digital medium like software user assistance requires the use of a variety of tools. A plumber needs a pipe wrench, and we need our authoring tools. Job listings frequently include a variety of tools as prerequisites, so it pays to keep your tool skills current and comprehensive.
Working as software developers also requires us to be knowledgeable about markup and programming languages. Understanding Coding HTML (63%) and Cascading Style Sheets (57%) are virtually requirements today. We place less emphasis on the importance of detailed knowledge of XML (41%), client-side scripting (24%), or other programming languages (13%).
Quality Assurance (53%) popped into the top ten skills for the first time .
Here are the percentages of respondents rating the rest of the skills choices as either "Very Valuable" or "Invaluable":
